## What it is

`/contents` returns clean, structured content from any URL, handling JavaScript-rendered pages, PDFs, and complex layouts automatically. You pass in URLs and get back full page text, targeted highlights, LLM-generated summaries, or all three. It can also be used to crawl linked subpages to pull content from entire site sections in a single request. All contents features are also available in `/search` for returned URLs, at no extra charge up to 10 results per search ($1/1000 pages afterwards). We recommend using `/search` in this way instead of `/contents` for web search tool use cases.

## Key Capabilities

### Content Modes

Choose how you receive content, or combine them in a single request:

| Mode     | What You Get                                      | Best For                                    |
|----------|--------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|
| **Text** | Full page content as clean markdown               | Deep analysis, full context research        |
| **Highlights** | Key excerpts relevant to your query        | Agent workflows, factual lookups (10x fewer tokens) |
| **Summary** | LLM-generated abstract                        | Quick overviews, structured extraction with JSON schema |

### Subpage crawling

Automatically discover and extract content from linked pages within a site. Pass `subpages: 10` and optionally `subpageTarget: ["docs", "about"]` to focus on relevant sections.

### Content freshness

Control whether results come from cache or are freshly crawled with `maxAgeHours`:

| Setting     | Behavior                                                                  |
|-------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Omit (default) | Livecrawl only when no cache exists                                  |
| `24`       | Use cache if < 24 hours old, otherwise livecrawl                       |
| `0`        | Always livecrawl (slowest, freshest)                                   |
| `-1`       | Cache only (fastest, may be stale)                                     |

## Common use cases

Token-efficient info from an article

Get the most relevant excerpts without needing the full page.

```
result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://example.com/research-paper"],
  highlights={"query": "methodology and results"}
)
```

Structured outputs using summaries

Extract specific fields from any page using a JSON schema.

```
result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://example.com/company-page"],
  summary={
    "query": "Extract company information",
    "schema": {
      "type": "object",
      "properties": {
        "name": {"type": "string"},
        "industry": {"type": "string"},
        "founded": {"type": "number"}
      },
      "required": ["name", "industry"]
    }
  }
)
```

Crawl many pages from a website

Pull content from a docs site, targeting specific sections.

```
result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://docs.example.com"],
  subpages=15,
  subpage_target=["api", "models", "embeddings"],
  max_age_hours=24,
  text={"max_characters": 5000}
)
```

## Human Quickstart

Get your API key from the [Exa Dashboard](https://dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys).

- Python

```
pip install exa-py
```

```
from exa_py import Exa

exa = Exa(api_key="your-api-key")

result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://example.com/article"],
  highlights=True
)
```

- JavaScript

```
npm install exa-js
```

```
import Exa from "exa-js";

const exa = new Exa("your-api-key");

const result = await exa.getContents(
  ["https://example.com/article"],
  {
    highlights: true
  }
);
```

- cURL

```
curl -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/contents" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "urls": ["https://example.com/article"],
    "highlights": true
  }'
```